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In the never-ending battle between online gaming's trolls and the moderators that try to make servers harassment-free, the developers at Tripwire Interactive are threatening to bring out a rarely used weapon. According to the game's EULA, when players are found cheating, griefing, or "cyber bullying," Tripwire "will revoke your CD key and ban you from the KF2 servers and tell your mom!"

Parental threats aside, banning problematic players is one of the most common punishments for bad behavior in online games. But Tripwire's threat extends past the online portion to a full revocation of the license for the game, single-player included. "Your license will automatically terminate, without notice, and you will have no right to play KF2 or any KF2 Mods against other players or make any other use of KF2," the EULA warns. "End of story."

But Tripwire is surprisingly upfront and straightforward about threatening to take away access to the entirety of Killing Floor 2 for players who engage in cheating, "'griefing,' racist bigotry, sexism or any other forms of 'cyber bullying,'" or players that operate servers that enable the same.

Further Reading

Tripwire Vice President Alan Wilson waded into the argument himself in his own Steam Community thread, suggesting that this game-revoking power will be reserved for the worst, most serial offenders. "[The EULA clause] is there so that, if at some point in the future, some individual gets utterly out of control and is being abusive to enough thousands of people to come to our attention - we can actually take action," Wilson writes. "People are worried that we can "take your game away". Well, yes, we can. We've sold around 10 million games over the last 10 years," Wilson writes. "We have, I believe, taken away games from about 2 people. One of those was later convicted as a hacker in court."

Rather than removing these trolls from the game altogether, we think Tripwire might have been better off following the lead of Microsoft and Rockstar in sequestering problem players in their own servers, where they can only grief each other. While not being able to play a game you bought is definitely a strict punishment, being forced to play a game with only the most vile parts of the Internet is arguably much worse.

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Kyle Orland
Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area. Emailkyle.orland@arstechnica.com//Twitter@KyleOrl